


all it takes is a little faith and a lot of heart

by pocky_slash



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Canon Disabled Character, Established Relationship, M/M, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 10:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1222933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/pseuds/pocky_slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik lives in a world of right and wrong, yes and no. He really wasn't prepared for Charles to respond to his marriage proposal with a third answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all it takes is a little faith and a lot of heart

**Author's Note:**

> All I've wanted this February is fluffy happy established relationship fic which this...is not. So I don't know what's going on with my brain.
> 
> Thanks as always to **pearl_o** , who helped strengthen the characters and setting to make this a stronger story. She's my favorite ♥

Charles tracks Erik by his emotions--shock and embarrassment are stoked into overwhelming anger and frustration that fade into shame. The shame turns into resignation, and by the time Charles feels him approaching the Life Sciences building, the resignation has steeled itself into determination. It's a gentle, painful determination, but it's still there as Erik hesitantly opens the door to the roof and crosses to where Charles is sitting. He waves his hand and turns an abandoned gutter and the crooked side panel of one of the air conditioning units into a rough approximation of a chair and he sits down.

"You know," Charles says. "I was very good at hiding as a child. Whenever Mum and Kurt started arguing or Cain got mean or even when there were parties I wanted to avoid, I could always squeeze myself into the best hiding spots." He taps the right wheel of his chair. "It's a bit harder, these days. One only has to look for the elevator."

"You always come up here when you're upset," Erik says. 

"It's one of the only places I can go that's relatively secret," Charles says. He remembers all of the training in communication from his youth. He's supposed to speak slowly and enunciate and look at the person he's talking to. Don't default to telepathy. Don't look at anyone's thoughts or use their feelings to reshape the conversation. Rely on what they say and how they look. 

He's always been rubbish at the rules, and he can't bring himself to look at Erik right now. He can see Erik perfectly in his mind, a portrait painted in the turbulence of Erik's emotions. He doesn't need to look with his eyes to catalogue the nervous tilt to Erik's mouth or the confused slump of his shoulders. He appreciates the joys of the body, of Erik's body, even, in particular, but it doesn't offer him anything he can't get from the mind.

"You said you needed to think," Erik says.

"I do," Charles says. He closes his eyes on sunset on the quad, colors and light reflecting off the snow and ice covered tree branches. The other students are a distant hum of baseline anxiety and joy and exhaustion and frustration, all of the happy canceling out all of the sad to a steady, level hum. Erik shines brightly beside him, his beacon. 

"You know, the way you feel things," he says. "The way you feel things--you feel everything to a power of ten. Your emotions are so strong and so pure. You're always so positive of your own mind, your own thoughts, and you dive head first into all of them. Even if you're embarrassed or ashamed, it consumes you. Every cause you support gets every last ounce of your energy. Everything you love you love fully." It was this that first piqued Charles' interest, the way Erik's thoughts were so much stronger, so much brighter than anyone else's. He was hopeless within minutes of meeting Erik for the first time, already half in love with mind--unique and beautiful in technicolor, dedicated and determined and so sharply focused Charles could hardly breathe. That it came in such a beautiful body was a bonus--even without a physical form, Charles would love him as he does now--wholly, fully, dangerously. "You don't do things in halves," he says, and he tries to smile on that, like it's a joke, but it's not. It's the crux of the thing, and Erik knows it. He thinks his smile droops on one side, shaky and scared.

"I can't help the way I feel," Erik says. His ire is climbing again. "I can't stop it."

"I wouldn't want you to," Charles says. "I love you. I love that about you."

"What about you?" Erik asks. "How do you feel?"

How does Charles feel? He feels a myriad of nuanced, contradictory things, as well as the residual emotions of everyone in a ten mile radius. Charles feel thrilled and horrified and resigned and beside himself with happiness, all at once, comingling in a terrified euphoric haze. Charles feels things from so many angles he's learned to pause and think things over before saying his peace. Speaking without thinking usually ends with his foot in his mouth and embarrassed regret.

Not like Erik. Charles hesitates to use the term "black and white," because Erik's mind is so complex and colorful, but Erik's feelings are...concrete. It's been the start of more than one of their arguments--most of them, really, but also a constant source of amusement to Charles as he watches Erik grade the essays from the Intro to Mutant Politics course he TAs. Charles thinks Erik would be more suited to absolutes of science and math, but he chooses instead to pursue the more philosophically and sociologically grey area of Mutant Studies, though it's not grey to him. To Erik, the world is right and wrong, yes and no.

For instance, he was completely unprepared for Charles to provide a third answer to his marriage proposal.

"Scared," Charles says. He opens his eyes. The world remains as he left it, coated in snow and ice with more threatening overnight, even as the sky is streaked orange in the last light of the setting sun. Erik is warm next to him, another little perk of bodies in weather like this. Charles can only feel half the cold, but sometimes he thinks that just makes it worse. He appreciates that Erik is always warm where their skin touches.

He's hit with a sense memory of the first time Erik touched him, two years ago. The eidetic memory of his telepathy fills in all the details--how tentative Erik's hands were as he touched Charles' face, neck, arms, the split second of hesitation before he went lower. He remembers, too, the brilliant bursts of lust and attraction, of anticipation. There was no regret or revulsion as he pressed his hands to Charles' hips and thighs, nothing but single-minded determination as he asked Charles what to do, colored slightly with the embarrassment that he had to ask in the first place. Not embarrassment over where he was or who he was with or what they were doing, but embarrassment that he should have to ask, that he didn't already know how best to touch Charles, to make him feel good, because that's what was important to him--making Charles feel as good as Erik felt.

He turns to Erik now, Erik whose patience is at war with a vivid cacophony of all his other emotions. When he thinks of Erik, he thinks of the sunrise in _The Phantom Tollbooth_ \--loud and musical and awash with every color of the rainbow. His jaw is set and his eyes are red. Charles wonders if angry tears made their way out in the aftermath of Charles' departure. He would feel guilty if he wasn't so focused on everything else.

"I'm scared," he says again. "I'm terrified."

"You're running away," Erik says flatly.

"No," Charles tells him. "If I was running away, you'd know it. I'm trying to think. I'm trying to...figure out what I feel. What I want."

"I'm scared too," Erik says, and Charles shakes his head.

"You're not," he says. "Not like this. You feel so much. You're so devoted. And I'm--I don't know what I can offer you. I don't know what I offer you now. I don't want you to feel trapped, to do this out of pity--"

"I have never pitied you," Erik says. He grabs Charles' hand, a gesture out of character. Erik doesn't touch casually. Erik doesn't do anything casually--he controls his body with the same rigid self-determination he controls everything else, and here he is, squeezing Charles' hand in his own, almost unconsciously. "You must know that. You must be able to tell. Look. Look in my mind and see if I pity you."

"I know you don't," Charles says. His heart is in his throat. Erik's fingers are warm through the thin material of Charles' fingerless gloves. "But these things can fester. It's different, living with something, sharing space with it. It's different--" He swallows. It's hard to think with the intensity of Erik's feelings battering up against him like this, with Erik's hand holding his own. "It's different when it's in your house, your bed, your life, your world, all the time. When you can't go home and escape it. That's what this would be, Erik. Marrying me--it's marrying all of his." He uses his other hand to gesture to his body, his motionless legs, his wheelchair, the careful path in the snow shoveled by Erik yesterday afternoon from the door to this part of the roof, to the world that surrounds Charles, the world that's changed so much in the last five years thanks to an SUV driven by a man who had one too many before last call.

"I would never pity you," Erik says. "Never. I wouldn't--I'm not going to--you can't think that about me. If you don't want to marry me--I'm not forcing you. You can say 'no,' you know. If you don't want to marry me, you can say 'no' and we can keep going like we are or I can disappear completely--" Charles closes his eyes at even the thought of it. "--but I thought--I thought you wanted this. And if you do, I don't understand what's happening."

"You're so young," Charles says, his voice catching in his throat. "We both are. You're twenty-five and there's so much that you haven't done or seen--I don't want you to do this because you feel obligated. I don't want you to resent me."

"I don't do anything because I feel obligated." He practically spits out the last word, squeezing Charles' hand. He's right. If anything, the obnoxiously contrary part of Erik's soul works hard to rebel against anything obligatory. "It's been over two years. I've taken you places. You met my mom and my sister--and I basically live with you now. I've done things for you that are personal and embarrassing. I've taken care of you when you were sick. And I've seen other people--I've been with other people, Charles, and no one can make me feel like this. I thought I made you feel that way too."

"You do," Charles says. There are a hundred reasons Charles can come up with to protest this proposal. They're both still in school. Erik is sometimes so volatile and extreme, Charles is afraid he'll do something stupid in pursuit of mutant rights. They fight about politics constantly, about how to keep house, about Charles' self-care. Erik is quick to anger and carries a grudge. Charles is terrified of his own weaknesses and happy to retreat rather than fight and possibly confront them. They're a mess--Charles' injury and the associated health problems, plus his depression, plus Erik's PTSD. They're a bomb waiting to explode.

But fuck if Charles doesn't love Erik more than he thought it would be possible to love someone. On paper, they're a longshot, but in two years, through all of it, Charles has never even considered leaving.

"You do," he says again. "I've never felt this way before."

"I love you," Erik says. "I don't care if it's going to be hard."

"I don't know how you can be so fearless," Charles says. His hands are shaking, and Erik is still holding the left one, so he must know.

"I don't have any other choice," he says.

Charles is quiet. He doesn't have words and he doesn't trust himself to share his thoughts. Erik remains patiently beside him--Charles is the only thing Erik has ever shown patience for.

"You must be freezing," Erik finally murmurs, turning Charles' hand over to rub at the bare tips of his fingers. "I don't know why you wear these stupid things."

"So I can use my tablet and my phone," Charles says. His hand feels good in Erik's--it always does--and Erik's fingers are so warm the touch almost burns them. This is an old argument, a long, deep breath of relief on the heels of something so heavy. 

"You can buy full fingered gloves with metallic thread in the fingertips," Erik says. "I can make you gloves with conductive material in the fingertips. You can get those smoker's mittens."

"It's just easier this way," Charles says, and Erik rolls his eyes, like he always does.

"You make me insane, you know that?" he says.

"And you want to marry me," Charles says dryly.

"Yes," Erik says. No sarcasm, no hesitation. He says it earnestly, without hyperbole or defense. _Yes_. He's steadfast in this desire, unwavering. His resolution blankets them both and wells up in Charles' own throat, an embarrassing threat of tears as Erik's thumb continues to rub across Charles' fingertips.

He swallows through the emotion and pauses to breathe and blink away the wetness in his eyes.

"I can't say yes right now," Charles finally manages to say. "I'm not going to say no. But I need--I need a moment to think before I say yes."

"I can wait," Erik says. He shifts his hold on Charles' hand and curls around his fingertips, warming them in his fist. "I can wait all night."

Charles lets out another shaky breath. Erik is volatile and intense and a terrible anchor, but Charles can't help but rely on him in moments like this. It could be Charles' penchant for self-destructive behavior but, more simply, he thinks it's probably love.

"Come here," he says. "I'm freezing."

Erik stands up from his chair of scraps and settles himself on Charles' lap, his arms around Charles' shoulders. He rests his cheek on the top of Charles' head and Charles slips his freezing hands between Erik's jacket and sweater.

"Are you sure you want to sign on to this?" Charles asks. "All of these neuroses, I mean?"

"Til death do us part," Erik says. "Of course, it's possible that I'll kill you for leaving the milk on the counter three weeks into our marriage, so."

The laugh rolls out of Charles with a burst of surprise. He presses his face, his smile, his wet eyes into Erik's shoulder.

"That was once," he says.

"Three times," Erik says. "The next time I'm going to let it go bad and then put it back in the fridge for you to use in the morning."

"Cruel and unusual," Charles says.

Erik snorts and the flurry of determination surrounding him changes into something else.

"What I said before--if you don't want to sign on to 'cruel and unusual--'"

Charles swallows hard. This was the opposite of what he wanted, the thing he was afraid of in his retreat, that his brain was too despairing to think about as he rolled steadily across campus. It hurts him now, though, burrowing through Charles' selfishness and right to the core of his love for Erik, bleeding outward, cold as ice.

"Never," Charles says, as fiercely as he can manage. He slips his hands out from under Erik's jacket so he can shove lightly at Erik's chest, push him back enough that Charles can look him in the eye. "Erik--it has nothing to with--and it doesn't matter anyway. Because I'm through being stupid. Yes."

"Yes?" Erik asks. He looks afraid to ask for clarification.

"Yes," Charles says. "Absolutely I will marry you."

"Oh," Erik says. His small smile belies the way his emotions are swelling, flashing, dancing around him in a twist of affection and jubilation and relief and wonder. "Good."


End file.
